Localization Style Guide Best Practices

How to write a style guide translators will actually read

It's actually easier to write a good style guide than a bad one. Good style guides are concise, to the point, and easy to maintain. Here's how we do it.

• Style guides are living documents. The best place to story them is online, in something like Google Docs, for example. Easy to update, easy to share.


• The best style guides have bold section headings, and concise descriptions.
example

Never translate:


• App name
• Product names
• Job titles

versus


For the most part, you should translate everything you see. There are, of course, some exceptions, because we don't always want to translate certain things because of trademarks or because we advertise them. These may include, but are not limited to, things like app names and product names. So, for example, we wouldn't want…



• A style guide works best with real-word examples.
use informal speech


In most cases we prefer informal writing when talking to customers.
example:
¡Compra ahora¡ NOT Compre ahora
Hola Juan NOT Estimado cliente Juan Delgado




• Successful style guides are language-specific.

  Start with an English style guide for all translators, but adapt it to each language. Your style guide will be “universal” but also “specific” to the languages.

  french
  use informal speech
  

  Customers should be addressed in vous, but language should still be friendly and informal.
  example:
  

  Nouveau client ? Commencez ici. NOT Si vous êtes nouveau client, commencez ici.
  

  Informal speech might mean something different in French versus, say, Spanish. In Spanish, the verb tense must be informal, but as in the above French example, the verb tense is technically formal but the language is still informal. These kinds of subtleties must sometimes be addressed on a per-language level.



• Pro tip Add a change log to your style guide!

Translators will read a style guide before the first job, but as you make changes and additions, it’s hard to motivate translators to re-read the guide. We suggest you include on the first page of the style guide a change log of what has been updated along with the date.

20 feb App name may be transliterated in Hindi only.

Each time you do this, I further suggest the changes be visible in a different color, so the translators can read the new style guide information quickly.